


Locks

by Muffinworry



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-02
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-10-02 15:59:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17267099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muffinworry/pseuds/Muffinworry
Summary: Four snippets about my favourite Discworld ladies, for the prompt "Haircut"





	Locks

**Author's Note:**

> "A woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life" - Coco Chanel

It’s not going to get any better, no matter how long Sybil stares in the mirror.

She’s twenty six and her hair is, like her, plain and taking up too much space. She normally rakes it back savagely under kerchiefs or in tight knots. This is the third time she’s had to hack off the singed ends before her mother sees and makes her give up her pets.

Sybil sighs and reaches for the scissors. Nobody else is going to care for these dragons if she doesn’t. Hair is a small price to pay. Suddenly, more and more locks are falling at her feet, until her hair is nearly all shorn to a couple of inches. Sybil’s reflection gazes back at her – strangely vulnerable, wide eyed. She raises a firm chin and heads back to the stables, which are her fiefdom now that Mama has officially given up hope of Sybil ever making a match. She puts on her wellies, stamping her feet savagely. Straightens her back and refuses to worry about it. The last delivery of coal was late, and she needs to make the man understand that her dragons can’t wait around to be fed.

The first time Sam sees her without a wig, she’s honestly forgotten she isn’t wearing one. She doesn’t realize until he smiles and kisses her, rather shyly, and tells her what a beautiful neck she has.

For her wedding day, she orders a specially made tower of silver and white curls, with pearls threaded through it to match her dress. It seems a little silly, but she’s determined to do this right. Sam deserves the best.

Fifteen minutes before the ceremony, she swirls into her dressing room looking for the wretched, scratchy thing. She hears a draconic belch and Sybil throws open the door. Lord Mountjoy Talonthrust III looks up and dribbles at her apologetically. Sybil looks past him at the ruined confection on the wig stand. Half the curls are charred, and the air is filled with the scent of smoking orange blossoms and roses.

Sybil puts a hand to her mouth.

She dismisses her flapping maids, and looks at herself in the mirror. Older now. Wide eyes. Firm chin.

Suddenly she laughs. She places the duchess’s coronet on on her greying, clipped hair, where it looks rather spiffing. She’s still laughing as she walks herself briskly down the aisle, to where Sam is waiting for her.

***

“Killer!” laughs John, “have mercy!”

Adora Belle brandishes the hairbrush, which is currently standing in for the Sword of Om.

“Never, villain!” she yells at her brother.

Their mother flutters in and shoes Adora Belle off to her room. Too loud, she says. Not ladylike.

Seven-year-old Adora Belle resolves to get her hands on a real sword as soon as she can. That hairbrush was rubbish in battle anyway.

Twelve years later she’s watching the rain drumming on a coffin, her glossy black hair loose around her shoulders. Her parents have given up. They don’t want to hear about broken fingers and burning injustice. They hadn’t even had enough money to bury John properly. Adora Belle thinks about hairbrushes and swords, and how many monsters she’ll need to fight before she can quell the anger that’s burning her from the inside out.

The next morning, she scrapes her hair back into the tightest bun she can, lights a cigarette, and steps out on the road to Ankh-Morpork.

***

Perdita loves their waist-length chestnut ringlets.

Agnes does too, but she knows there’s nothing glamorous about the way they fall in her face when she’s polishing her cauldron or gathering herbs in the woods. There’s something galling, too, about the way everyone notices the hair, then looks at Agnes’s broad, sensible face. Sometimes they sigh a little. If she’s having a really bad day, they tell her how nice she is, and what a wonderful personality she has.

Agnes tries hard not think about hexing them. Perdita invents new curse words in her head.

The hat helps – people notice the tall black hat first now, crammed down on the wonderful mane of hair.

She nearly cuts it all off after staying up all night helping Mrs. Weaver deliver a calf at midnight.

Granny sniffs and says nothing, and pats her own hard grey bun, skewered with half a dozen lethal hatpins. But the calf is fine and healthy, and hair will wash, and Agnes is learning that there’s more than one way to be a witch.

 

***

Ankh-Morpork is certainly the world’s most expensive city. And a sergeant in the Night’s Watch who wants to get married needs solid collateral.

Angua, despising her family’s money, takes out a loan at the newly opened Royal Bank. That twisty bastard running it owes her a favour or three, and doesn’t hesitate to sign over what she needs.

Then she’s on her way to a narrow lane behind the Alchemist’s Guild, where a family of enterprising dwarves make and sell the Good Boy line of pet grooming products – shiny coat guaranteed.

The dogs around the place go silent when she enters, and slink under the table, but the dwarves are pleasant enough, and become positively friendly when she produces her bank draft. Five hours of complex negotiations later – she’d come prepared, she is from Überwald after all – Angua leaves with a silent partnership in the firm, and a draft of a new bottle design.

Carrot doesn’t much like it, comments that the secret ingredient in Silky Tresses is less a mystical mountaintop herb, plucked by maidens at dawn, and more, in fact, a de-worming tablet. But as Angua points out, they can afford to get married now: the pretty pink bottles are selling like hotcakes, and it’s well known that the fashionable new shampoo does, indeed, bring up the shine something lovely.


End file.
